this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2025
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You can save so much money with CAD if you neither factor in your time to actually learn it or the cost of the printer itself.
Makes crime even better in comparison.
The saving on the knob alone would pay a reasonable chunk of a basic but useful printer. Use it for a few more things and you'll be in the black even ignoring the more fun things you might do. The time it takes to learn a CAD system can also be fun if you enjoy that sort of thing.
I'm proof. My first printer is currently worth like $25. Maker Select V2. Still works great. I learned FreeCAD and enjoyed every minute.
As someone who replaced his Maker Select Plus with a Bambu Lab P1S a few months ago…if you do get a new printer, be prepared to be angry for a moment.
I spent so much time and effort improving that thing over the years, and the modern printer was so much better right out of the box. 😅
(Not that I don’t still have a fond place in my heart for my old bedslinger. A friend has it now, so it’s still chugging along.)
Haha yea I did, actually. A few months ago I built a Voron 0.2. It's soooo much better in every way. But the MS2 is still capable, especially with upgrsdes (just not with ABS). I decided against the Bamboo route because I loved the FOSS nature of the MS2, and building the Voron brought back those 'first time building a PC vibes'. It was a great experience.
I've got a Sovol Max on order, so the MK2 will probably also be donated to a friend this year.
Nice! I’ve considered a Voron, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to dedicate that much time to the printer as opposed to the printing. (I feel like I got my fill of excessive tinkering already 😅)
But the closed nature of Bambu does bother me, I’ll admit.
Yea, I was told I "have a 3D printer hobby, not a 3D printing hobby". 😆
I loved building the Voron, but did decide to go with a Sovol instead for the larger machine to both avoid the build and have a larger volume.
The 0.2 was great because it was cheap, didn't need to be my main printer at the time so I could be patient with it, and it is blazingly fast, especially heat up time since the bed is so small.
compooter + printer still go brrrrrrrrrrr
More of a brrrrr zoop zoop eeeeeeep save me brrrr doop ding please zrrriiippp scooop
Here in Canada every major library I've been to has a 3D printer you can use, either for free if you bring your own filament, or for a very small fee to use theirs. I live in a small town of 70,000 people and our public library has a 3D printer.
I would just like to say that 70k people isn't a small town. I live in a town with 9k people in it. Now that's a small town.
Only 9k people? That's not a town, that's a village.
/s
9k? That's a major city. I lived and worked in an area where the 9k town about an hour away was the bee's knees for the folks where I was, which had a great!!! city of 2,500, and the rest were unincorporated places of a hundred or so at the crossroads.
Shoot, I just moved to town under 1k.
There are places which will print out your model for a small fee on their own printer. There are even places which will allow you to use their printer if you come with your own filament (for example makerspaces) and maybe donate a little bit to support them.
As for CAD itself, there's a nonzero chance that someone already designed that part for themselves and you can download a ready model. If not, then by designing it yourself you're acquiring a skill that can be useful again in the future and you can share that model with others to get that warm fuzzy feeling that you've helped strangers who had the same problem.
My printer has saved me more than its cost in useful stuff I have printed.
I have wasted a bunch of time making things, but like woodworking or similar trades, it's fun and rewarding.
Hence, why it's not "wasted" time.
Someone else I know got a printer and got bored printing with it after a bit and said I can print on it whenever if I toss them a roll of material every now and then.
I ended up finding all kinds of useful things to print. I made a connection piece for a sink that had a garbage disposal removed when I couldn't find the fitting anywhere and after 3 years it's holding up fine. I made a set of cams for a washer that randomly stopped spinning one day and those have been working nicely. Just a bunch of times it ended up coming in handy.
Learning a new and useful skill is not "wasting" time at all.
You can't put that in quotation marks like I ever said something about wasting time. You just have to include all that time in your cost calculation.
Not really, no. If you're learning something not only that you like, but that it's also useful and that you will you use many times in the future, I wouldn't consider that to be part of the "cost".